Harry's magic is not by the book

Harry Potter may have put children's noses back inside books but the challenge of keeping them there requires more than just words.

According to new research, children need the added stimuli of movies, video games, websites and toys associated with a book to keep them reading.

Dr Allison Simpson, of Sydney University's faculty of education and social work, said a huge part of the Harry Potter series success was the accompanying multimedia.

"Kids are sitting down again and having a good read but you really need a multimedia approach to keep them engaged," he said.

Potter's creator, author J.K. Rowling, even writes in a way that lends itself to the visual medium. "The way the narrative is constructed, the way scenes are described, such as when they're approaching a castle from a distance, is very visual," she said.");document.write("

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"You can almost see in the text the panoramic view as the camera pans up the scene. You get the feeling that, in her writing, especially in the latter books, Rowling is responding to the way kids perceive images in a multimedia world."

Rowling's style is probably the template for most future children's writers, especially if they want the PlayStation, CD-ROM, website and big-screen spin-offs. The writing must be vivid in setting and description, such as in the battle scenes that illustrate the Potter plotlines, and less dialogue based.

But if authors write like Enid Blyton, in whose books the worst fate to befall a character is being "locked in a cupboard with hockey sticks", their stories will remain in books.

"There's not the elemental danger you get in Harry Potter," Dr Simpson said.

According to her joint research with Len Unsworth and Angela Thomas, children's literacy goes well beyond the printed word.

"The narrative is no longer just in words," Professor Unsworth said. "We find that children and teens are still reading, as the Harry Potter phenomenon shows, but they may not read an entire book. They'll look for the website or the video game to complement their appreciation of the work."

He said the Disney character Mulan, for example, was a traditional Chinese tale that planted itself in modern children's consciousness through film.

But filmmakers hoping to cash in on such narratives should remember the experience of some Potter fans, who, said Dr Simpson, emerged from the movie Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets complaining it was not faithful enough to the book.